Quotes from book

Northanger Abbey

“Friendship is really the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.”

“Where the heart is really attached, I know very well how little one can be pleased with the attention of any body else.”

“I assure you. I have no notion of treating men with such respect. That is the way to spoil them.”

“Miss Morland, no one can think more highly of the understanding of women than I do. In my opinion, nature has given them so much, that they never find it necessary to use more than half.”

“Beware how you give your heart.”

“A family of ten children will be always called a fine family, where there are heads and arms and legs enough for the number.”

“A young woman in love always looks like Patience on a monument Smiling at Grief.”

“And from the whole she deduced this useful lesson, that to go previously engaged to a ball, does not necessarily increase either the dignity or enjoyment of a young lady.”

“No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be a heroine… But from fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine…”

“No man is offended by another man's admiration of the woman he loves; it is the woman only who can make it a torment.”

“Now I must give one smirk and then we may be rational again”

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid”

“[I]t is well to have as many holds upon happiness as possible.”

“What one means one day, you know, one may not mean the next. Circumstances change, opinions alter.”

“A mother would have been always present. A mother would have been a constant friend; her influence would have been beyond all other.”

“I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.”

“If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?”

“Catherine […] enjoyed her usual happiness with Henry Tilney, listening with sparkling eyes to everything he said; and, in finding him irresistible, becoming so herself.”

“A woman, especially if she has the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.”